Last month I audited my calendar. Not the obvious stuff — I already protect against unnecessary meetings. I was looking for something subtler: meetings that existed because nobody was empowered to make the decision that the meeting was supposedly about.

I found five.

The pattern

It looks like this: a PM schedules a “sync” with Engineering and Design. The stated purpose is “alignment on approach.” What’s actually happening is that nobody in the room has the authority — or the confidence — to make the call alone. So they convene a meeting, share perspectives, nod in agreement, and leave feeling aligned.

But nobody decided anything. The meeting was the decision. Or worse: the meeting was a way to distribute the risk of deciding.

This is expensive. Not just the calendar time — the real cost is the organisational signal. Every alignment meeting that should have been a decision tells the team: “We don’t trust individuals to choose.”

Why it happens

Three root causes, in my experience:

Unclear ownership. If it’s not obvious who owns a decision, people default to consensus. Consensus feels safe but it’s slow, and it produces lowest-common-denominator outcomes. The best teams I’ve led have a single owner for every meaningful decision — even when the decision affects multiple functions.

Risk aversion disguised as collaboration. Sometimes “let’s align” really means “let’s make sure nobody can blame me.” This isn’t a meeting problem. It’s a trust problem. People convene groups when they don’t feel safe making a call alone.

Manager overcorrection. Leaders who’ve been burned by a direct making a “wrong” call start requiring check-ins before decisions. The intention is quality control. The effect is paralysis. If your team needs your approval for every meaningful choice, you’ve built a bottleneck, not a team.

What I do instead

Name the decision owner. Before any meeting, I ask: who will make this decision? If the answer is “we’ll discuss and decide together,” I push back. Someone needs to own it. Others advise. The owner decides.

Separate advice from approval. Advice is valuable — seek it broadly. But advice and approval are different things. A decision owner should gather perspectives, then decide. They don’t need a meeting to do that. A Slack thread or a short document works for most advice-gathering.

Create safe decision-making. This is the hard part. People need to believe that making a reasonable decision — even one that turns out wrong — is better than not deciding. I tell my teams: I don’t judge decisions that don’t work out. I judge indecision. I judge the meeting that should have been a call.

Audit the recurring calendar. Every quarter, I look at recurring meetings and ask: what decision does this meeting serve? If it doesn’t serve a specific decision or outcome, it’s either a status update (make it async) or a social ritual (keep it but be honest about what it is).

The outcome metric

Here’s how I know it’s working: when a PM cancels a meeting because they made the call themselves and sent a Slack summary instead. When an engineer writes a short RFC and tags reviewers instead of scheduling a design review. When someone says “I decided X, here’s why” instead of “can we align on X?”

The goal isn’t fewer meetings. It’s more decisions.

Meeting cadence and decision ownership are part of how I lead.